The Society for Romanian Studies offers a mentoring program that pairs scholars at different stages of their careers or in different parts of the world to facilitate mutually beneficial discussions and communication. Junior scholars gain local information formally from their supervisors and informally from others they come into contact with. Informal mentorship is particularly important for students and scholars working in the West whose primary supervisors are not themselves specialists in Romania and Moldova. Similarly, students and scholars based in Eastern Europe will find it beneficial to establish informal relationships with their colleagues abroad, with whom they can discuss disciplinary trends and other questions of mutual interest. Mentoring also benefits senior scholars by helping them stay abreast of new literatures and trends in the field as well as providing insights into other universities and other countries.
The purpose of the SRS Mentoring Program is to provide SRS members with invaluable support and established scholars the opportunity to help shape the future of the field and support new research. Responsibility for making the mentoring relationship work rests with the individual mentor/mentee, but the SRS acts as a sponsoring organization that matches mentors and mentees and suggests parameters for the relationship. The SRS aims at facilitating formal mentoring initiatives in cases where mentors and mentees do not know each other, have no clear understanding of their current expertise areas, and need help to connect.
Mentoring relationships may either be established around specific, short-term goals, such as writing a book proposal or developing strategies for acceptance into graduate schools, or may involve a series of discussions about career trajectories, publication plans, accessing libraries, archives, or fellowships, or other issues of mutual interest to the mentor and mentee. Individual pairs should agree on the nature and longevity of the commitment, but we envisage that most mentoring relationships will involve several informal conversations over a period of six months.
Since its inception in April 2017, the SRS mentoring program has attracted as many as 24 mentors working with 5 mentees for longer or shorter time periods. You can find a list of SRS mentors here. If you are interested in working with any of these mentors please complete a short form here. If you would like to serve as a mentor yourself, please complete a different form here.
For further details please contact Roland Clark (clarkr@liv.ac.uk) or any of the other members of the Mentoring Committee: Margaret Beissinger (mhbeissi@princeton.edu); Petru Negură (petru.negura@gmail.com); Robert Ives (rives@unr.edu); Cristina Plămădeală (montrealcp@gmail.com); and Anca Şincan (anca.sincan@gmail.com).